"The Magnificent Seven" - The Clash
"You're sweating, you're fretting, but did you notice, you're not getting anywhere"
The New York Times has a piece today by Neal Gabler on the demise of "big ideas," the thesis of which is immediately confirmed by dumbass Thomas Friedman's column entitled "A Theory of Everything (Sort of)." Jesus, if the latter is what passes for an attempt at a big idea in today's world, may big ideas be dead forever.* Gabler points to big political and scientific ideas of the past -- from Marxism to Freudian Psychology to the Theory of Relativity to Keynsian economics, among others -- and argues that we are not producing similar kinds of big thoughts in this era. It was an interesting and enjoyable article until, inevitably, the moment came to blame this shrinking of ideas on Facebook and twitter. (I am not a huge fan of either medium, but as Kevin Drum points out, the demise of public intellectuals has been fretted about since at least back to the days when MTV was showing music videos.) You would think an article about big ideas would avoid this kind of glibness.
I think there are a few things worth discussing in the article though. First, I think there needs to be a distinction drawn between big scientific ideas and big political and cultural ideas. The former are subject to empirical proof while the latter are not. I suspect that in science today there are still a great many big ideas being thought -- however, my guess is that they are at such a level of sophistication and speciality that they are likely to be far beyond most of intellectually. Although I am pretty much of a scientific illiterate, I suspect as well that big breakthroughs -- like Einstein's -- tend to be the product of many years and much tumult within a field, work that suddenly yields a larger insight that transforms the way that things are seen. I also suspect that such breakthroughs are inevitably limited in mumber, but that this in no way diminishes the seriousness of work that is going on at all times in fields like biology, physics, astronomy, etc.
Second, there was once a time where one could be on the cutting edge of science while also being heavily engaged in politics, philosophy, law, and other fields -- people like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, for example, managed this feat in the late Eighteenth Century. This is a much more difficult task in a world of highly advanced knowledge. Being a world class physicist or astonomer or mathematician or doctor is more than a full time job. Hell, the practice of law, which I view as a considerably less intellectually advanced field, generally requires high levels of specialization. There are very few people who manage to master more than a couple of specialties -- and, trust me, dabblers tend to get their heads handed to them.
Paradoxically, an absence of big ideas may also reflect the accumulation of a greater collective wisdom. Big ideas are often, in the end, foolish, misguided, simplistic, pseudo-scientific, and, in extreme cases, even murderous. Marxism and Freudian psychology are the classic Nineteenth Century big ideas -- huge, totalizing systems of thought that attempt to explain the world -- or huge chunks of the world -- in a manner that purports to be scientific. Marx and Freud -- and those who later developed on and synthesized their thinking from Gramsci to Marcuse to Adorno to Sartre -- wrote potently and evocatively about human economy and psychology -- indeed, wrote so powerfully that they continue to influence today, despite the fact that much of what they propounded was pseudo-scientific at best and some of it -- I'm looking at your Sartre -- was quite pernicious.
Obviously, this would be the big leagues of big thoughts, but even more modern and modest efforts do not always withstand scrutiny, from Daniel Bell's "The End of Ideology" to Francis Fukayma's "The End of History and the Last Man," both of which grossly underestimate the power of the violent and the irrational and the continued resonance in many quarters of a politics based on tribalism, religion, and cultural antagonisms. Proclaiming the rise of this or the end of that is too often a fool's errand, one which the world has a nasty habit of rendering irrelevant -- often within weeks of publication it seems.
I assume that many smart people personally don't proffer big ideas because they have the good sense to realize that the world is an incredibly complex and dynamic place and that humans are a strange and unpredictable lot, factors that should prompt some degree of humility in any observer. (I refrain myself because I don't really have any big ideas.) I think that this modesty is a form of wisdom, although I enjoy big ideas as much as the next guy -- even if just as something to tear down.
Gabler also seems to me to conflate social movements and big ideas in a way that I think is slightly misleading. Certainly the civil rights movement for African Americans in the U.S. and the feminist and gay rights movements in the West have produced a great deal of thought and ideological ferment. But in the end, it seems to me that these movements have largely been anchored in expanding the basic enlightenment notion captured in the line "all men are created equal" and their success has been based on the simple elegance of promoting the universality of this idea, rather than more abstruse ideological efforts. Political progress in the U.S. is a lot easier when you are relying on Jefferson and Lincoln say, rather than Amiri Baraka, Katherine MacKinnon, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, as your ideological linchpins.
Like Gabler, I would certainly like to see a more intelligent and sophisticated public discourse in America. But I tend to think that our greatest needs now are less for big ideas than for political strategies that will inform, persuade, and energize lower information and lower income voters, encouraging them to be active in elections and in the political process in a way that will help advance their interests.
*I'll have to dismantle the Mustache of Understanding later. In the meantime, these Matt Taibi pieces are alway fun reading on that score.
Please feel free to share your big ideas here. I will steal the best of them.
